Portland's public data is scattered across dozens of agencies and hard to make sense of. We pull it into one place — organized by topic, with the original sources, trends over time, and plain explanations of what the numbers mean.
Dashboards that track how the city is doing, an atlas of every park in Portland, surveys that capture what residents actually think, and permitting tools that make building here less confusing.
Source-linked public dashboards for housing, homelessness, public safety, budgets, city performance, and government accountability.
Every one of Portland's 316 parks in one place — conditions, maintenance backlogs, volunteer events, and the partners caring for them, all built from public data.
Independent, non-partisan surveys that gather input directly from Portlanders, publish the method, and show raw results next to weighted estimates.
Practical tools for understanding zoning, estimating fees, and navigating permitting timelines before people submit an application.
Some of Portland's most consequential policy questions are buried in actuarial reports and budget footnotes. We pull them into the open — visuals first, plain language, and interactive tools anyone can use.
Spending is up and it keeps growing. The math that explains why — an inflow/outflow simulator, who's actually homeless, the true cost of doing nothing, and what would actually work.
Portland owes $3.9 billion in police and fire pensions and saved almost none of it. See what FPDR costs you, who receives it, and try fixing it with an interactive reform simulator.
Can building homes out of wood in factories help fix the housing shortage? What it's good for, how much housing it can provide and at what cost — with a factory-cost calculator and the failure modes.
A dashboard can show what is happening. A survey can show what people believe and want. A workflow tool can help someone act on the rules in front of them. Portland Civic Lab connects those layers without pretending they are the same thing.
Dashboards make official city, county, state, and federal data easier to compare, audit, and use.
Ask Portland measures what residents actually think, with transparent sampling, weighting, and methodology.
Tools like Portland Permits turn complicated processes into clearer next steps for real users.
If there's a local problem you want measured, or public data that's hard to find and should be easier, propose it — and vote on what the Lab builds next. The roadmap is decided in public, by members.
Everything Portland Civic Lab publishes is free. Every dashboard, deep-dive, the parks atlas, and the permitting tools are open to any resident — no paywall, no account required, no charge. That's the heart of the project.
Portland Civic Lab is a for-profit company, and we're testing a simple idea: that a private company can do genuine public-interest work — building tools that make a city more legible to the people who live in it, and giving them away. We see that as a bridge between people who believe in private initiative and people who believe in strong public goods. We don't think the two have to be opposed.
We build from primary public data, label every source, and show the gaps honestly instead of inventing figures. We're independent and not affiliated with the City of Portland or any government agency.
The public tools are free and stay free — we cover the cost of building and maintaining them, with help from supporters who value the work and chip in to keep it free and fund what's next. Because the Lab is a company rather than a charity, contributions aren't tax-deductible donations — we'd rather be plain about that than leave it unsaid.